Overwatch: Geoff Goodman beantwortete Fragen zu dem Gameplay von Brigitte
Wie bereits in der Nacht von Montag auf Dienstag in den offiziellen Battle.Net Foren angekündigt wurde, hat der direkt an der Entwicklung von Overwatch beteiligte Game Designer Geoff Goodman gestern Abend ein kurzes Q&A zu dem Gameplay von Brigitte veranstaltet. Während dieses interessanten Events beantwortete dieser Mitarbeiter von Blizzard Entertainment mehrere Fragen aus der Community, die sich entweder direkt mit den Mechaniken dieses neuen Unterstützers oder ihren Auswirkungen auf das in den letzten Monaten etablierte Meta beschäftigten. Wer sich zwar für dieses Thema interessiert, aber nicht alle Kommentare und Antworten aus diesem Q&A durchgehen möchte, der findet folgend jetzt praktischerweise eine Auswahl der interessantesten Antworten von Game Designer Geoff Goodman.
(Hier findet ihr das komplette Q&A.)
Die Übersicht der interessantesten Antworten:
With Briggitte release, Ana becomes even more trash tier. What are your proposed changes to improve her without making her OP? Make her full hitscan? Scoped shots do slightly higher damage?
We’ve talked about a number of things we could do for Ana but don’t have any firm plans just yet. I don’t think she is super far off, and she does bring a number of tools that no other healer has access to. Currently she is more a victim of the dive meta than anything else, as she doesn’t fit well in that environment.
How exactly was Brigitte made to be meta changing? Most of the community has come to a conclusion that she is anti-dive, but I’m keen to know specifically how she was meant to be meta changing from the devs themselves. Just get a little insight on why you guys believe her to have the potential to do this. 
The biggest thing is that Brigitte is the first hybrid tank/support that we’ve released. That alone has the potential to create entirely new comps or counter existing comps.
Specifically for Brigitte though, she also can be very difficult to rush down and quickly kill. She can be very defensive with her shield and high health/armor, but she also can shield bash any enemies that come too close and knock them away or potentially just kill them. Players have already discovered how scary she can be to fight against as a Tracer player, as an example.
I’m not sure she will completely upset the dive meta just by herself, but she should certainly help!
How early in Moiras Developement did the concept of Briggitte start? Or was she envisioned afterwards? Furthermore, what was the inspiration behind her development? Was a paladin Archatype always something Blizzard wanted to explore?
Both Moira and Brigitte had very early prototypes near each other actually. There was a time where we just really felt like we need to add more healer options to the game asap, so we got to playing around with different prototypes and mechanics. In fact, Brigitte (who we just called ‘pally’ internally) was the one that first started with Moira’s Biotic Orb ability (though she only had the heal part of it). Initially Brigitte’s prototype was sort of… ‘lets see if we can do a healer who only healed via powerful cooldowns’, so thats where the bouncing heal ball started.
Eventually we wanted to push the tank hybrid angle much more which lead to her Inspire passive and armor ultimate. We weren’t even sure, originally, that it was going to be Brigitte or just some new character that has yet to be seen, but once her kit started coming together it really felt like a perfect fit.
Do you guys like making melee heroes? or are they harder to balance?
The short answer is Yes and Yes!
Reinhardt was one of our first heroes and he mostly just worked for us right away. In retrospect a lot of that was because of his shield which allows him to have another thing to do other than trying to constantly melee enemies.
Genji originally started as a hero that only had his sword, and he was going to be our second melee hero. We ran into huge problems trying to get him to work in the game like that, which is why we eventually gave him shurikens and made the melee his ultimate instead.
How will Brigitte affect new support hero development going forward? Considering she is a support/tank hybrid, will we see more of these kinds of supports in the future?
I think the goal for us is to always provide as much diversity as we can, in all aspects of the game! We don’t want to just make hybrid supports going forward, as some players really enjoy focusing heavily on a single role and it makes the potential group compositions much more interesting to have options.
I’m interested to hear what people want to see though! We’re always listening and trying to respond and react to what people are really wishing for.
Why was the choice made to give Brigitte such low damage when she’s intended to be part of the frontline brawl and hitting people as often as possible? Is it to nerf her killing potential to fall in line with the “She’s a Support” argument, or is it to maximize her healing potential with more swings per target?
On the flip side of that, why is her healing from her passive so low and why can it not stack? Granted she has the armor pack, but it doesn’t have a lot of team sustainability. Does the team think that the current selection of main healers is enough or is there a deeper reasoning for this?
Her basic melee damage tuning comes from a place where she just can’t be everything. Being a healer/tank hybrid that doesn’t leave a whole lot of room to dish out a ton of damage. That said, she can still occasionally deal some nice burst damage with her shield bash and whip combo.
On the topic of her passive healing, it is a difficult thing to tune. The original mechanic for her passive was that it would fire off every third melee hit, and had no cooldown (but didn’t stack still). This meant if you were smacking a ton of enemies all at once it would be firing off like crazy.
The issue we ran into with that (and the stacking heal), is that it made you feel like you always needed to be meleeing an enemy to be at your full potential, which left very little room for protecting allies or peeling enemies from your back line etc. As it is now, as long as you’re getting a melee hit in here and there, and landing your whip shots, you are healing as much as you can. We can always increase the passive healing amount if it ends up feeling too weak.
What’s the mindset behind gameplay features such as Brigitte’s flail stun and other mechanics such as freeze/sleep/earthshatter/McCree’s flash when other game designers have vocally talked about avoiding anything that takes control away from the player. In most shooters these mechanics are not available.
Can you talk a little about how your team sees these mechanics? What do they add from your POV?
Crowd control effects are always somewhat contentious, even internally for us. Overall I think the game is healthier having these mechanics in the game, especially since it can allow us to have heroes such as Tracer who are particularly weak to stun effects.
Rest assured, every time we are working on a hero that involves a crowd control effect we being very careful to make sure the game doesn’t devolve into too many CC effects.
A lot of pros think Brigette won’t change the meta because her heals aren’t reliable enough at that level. Many have suggested dive will never not be the meta due to the way maps are generally designed for high ground. What do you say about these concerns?
To be honest, its pretty hard to tell right now. We’ve actually gotten a lot of mixed feedback on her from all levels of play, as far as how powerful she is. The level design stuff is something we’ve been looking at a lot recently as well, as we agree there are some maps that certainly lend themselves to dive. We don’t have a specific goal to kill dive all together, but we agree it would be nice to see more diversity in the meta in general.
I see you guys are departing from a “teammate oriented support” style to a more “independent and free” style. In other words: from a passive concept to a proactive concept.
Is this a response to the criticism of players not fond of the “Mercy concept” or that loved being a healer but felt that most of the roster were EXTREMELY dependent on their teammates (aka: healers “were meant to serve” the rest of the team) ?
Has there been a change of vision of how you folks perceive support and how it should be in a FPS like Overwatch? What changed ? What has been kept ?
If so, is this change of direction trending for future supports ? I see Moira can fight on their own and deal with flankers and “Bri” actually leads the team. None of them was meant to stay in the backline just watching the others and enhancing the one’s damage !
I think you guys nailed with Moira and Briguitte. Keep with this style !
I think the bottom line here is to just make sure we have a lot of diversity in all our roles. While Moira and Brigitte are both hybrid healers, this doesn’t mean every hero coming out will be a hybrid of some kind. Many players really prefer to focus directly on a single role rather than split focus onto multiple roles, and we want to make sure that is supported as well!
Any fun or interesting bugs and interactions from development to share?
Every hero goes through a ton of changes throughout internal development! We have great tools to work worth so often instead of just talking about what might or might not be cool we can just throw something together and try it out.
For example, her ult started out very ‘kitchen sinky’. It used to do all of these things (at the same time):
- Gave her a ton of upfront armor for herself (I think it was like 150?)
- Armor regen for everyone
- Speed boost
- Made her shield solid metal which made it indestructible.
- Made it so if she shield bashed you while using this shield, you were knocked down like a Reinhardt ult, instead of just staggered.
Obviously this was pretty crazy but it was interesting to see what elements people really liked. Ultimately we decided to clean it up and get it down to what really mattered. Plus the stun thing was super overpowered
